PROJECT 1947: UFO Historical Revue - UHR #14 - Air Force UFO Documents Vietnam Era Surface

Air Force Vietnam Era UFO Reports Surface

THE National Archives in Washington, D.C. is commonly called America's memory. Housed there is the government’s UFO involvement between 1947 and 1969, Project Blue Book, with well over 100,000 pages of UFO investigations and administrative handling. It shouldn’t be surprising to say that Project Blue Book is not all there is to the official UFO memory. When the Freedom of Information Act was reconstituted into a more readily usable form for the public in 1974, many of us began to use it to probe what else might have been documented outside the influence of Blue Book. The result was around 4000 pages of UFO-related records by 1984, and well-more than double that to the present time

In this era of digitization it behooves the government to transform their hardcopy paperwork into an easier-to-use format. The National Archives has begun this process with its vast holdings, through what will be a long period of time. Project Blue Book is still available in hardcopy and microfilm from them but others have already digitized the film. Fold3.com has made Blue Book open to the public for a number of years.

Given that a variety of digitization projects are under way at the Archives, it doesn’t take much to check their search engines to see what has been added. If one takes the basis search of the whole Archive website and enters “UFO,” or a similar phrase, there will be a listing of Project Blue Book entries along with an assortment of other sources, such as Oral History discussions of the topic. However, there are other searches of the Archives that do not produce well-known sources.

I tried one of those: “access to archival databases” which probes the new digital listings of archive documents. Immediately a listing was compiled of message traffic for the State Department, long interested in simplifying their own archival problems. Using “UFO” I was able to access messages from the 1970s mostly dealing with the efforts by the island of Grenada to urge the United Nations to back a UFO study.

But a bigger surprise was looming. Along with the State Department listing was another file group, described as the “CACTA,” or “Combat Air Activities File.” This was a collection of records outlining air missions during the Vietnam war in summary form. Clearly, there has been a demand for old Vietnam papers, with Veteran(s) exploring their years of service and refreshing memories. A site with “Combat Air Activities?” Why not toss in “UFO” and see what happens without much in the way of expectations.

To my astonishment a list of records turns up, describing Air Activities in Vietnam with terms like “SUS UFO,” “UFO,” “UFO SERCH” and “UFO CHASE.” Such results, to put it mildly, were unconventional. During the time that Larry Fawcett, Bob Todd and myself were chasing documents while working with Citizens Against UFO Secrecy, we tried to avoid using the term “UFO” in correspondence beyond what had to be done when the acronym was specifically used in government records. In filing requests with Agencies, the impression was given after a while that including “UFO” in a request would raise the image of the requestor as a “kook”, “nut” or worse, with the request being marginalized as being less than serious. Agencies had many other ways to refer to such phenomena without using “UFO,” making our decision not to use it as practical. It is certain that the popular stigma of the UFO was difficult for agencies to use, even internally.

Well, apparently, this wasn't a universal notion. The Air Force in Vietnam not only used “UFO” but it was used as a standard descriptor when such a phenomenon was evident. With all of these reports in the CACTA database, “UFO” was ascribed well after the Condon Report's conclusions were widely publicized that nothing was to be gained by further Air Force investigations.

So what are these reports?

They are in a summary form on an Excel-like grid with no narratives. Some of the reports were listed more than once so, when combined, they boil down to sixteen reports. All the listed as “SECRET.” Apparently still not available to the public. As such, a FOIA Request will be filed shortly. The aircraft missions varied as, “air interdiction,” “visual recconnaisance,” (sic) “flare drop,” “strike,” or “airborne alert.” (see attached printout, next page) during this time the Air Force was backing away from UFOs publicly while at the same time liberally using that acronym for inside chronicling. UFO Researchers were wittingly trying to avoid the tainted term, while unwittingly we were missing interesting information by not using it.

Note that reports of possible unidentified man-made vehicles, or “Aircraft (Unident)”, were distinguished from not-obviously man-made objects, or “Unknown/Unidentified.” None of the reports are in Project Blue Book's listing of UFO cases. This is likely an echo of the Bolender memo which said that reports of National Security concern are not part of the Blue Book system.

Almost certainly some of these reports could have a conventional explanation if there were more than summaries. There would seem to be no good reason to withhold the reports if a FOIA request were filed. These events were 50 years ago. Invoking National Security for a war that ended in the now distant past would not be convincing.

The CACTA database is limited in coverage at the moment, offering results from only three years of the Vietnam war out of the ten fought. It is fully expected that more such incidents will appear When the database is expanded.

Case summaries (all reports except 1/25/69 were at night):